In a few days’ time thousands of students from the University, MCAST and the Institute for Tourism Studies will complete their studies and hope to take their first steps in the labour market. Most of them would have worked hard to obtain a certificate or degree that should hopefully open up a few job opportunities, even though the days when a higher educational achievement was a guarantee for a secure and well-paid job are a thing of the past.
Our political leaders need to come up with better ways of supporting families who prefer to educate their children in private independent schools- John Cassar White
Some students will unfortunately realise that they may have made the wrong choice of studies as they discover that there are few job opportunities for students with certain qualifications. The notion that the scope of education should primarily be self-fulfilment will start to sound hollow when one finds few or no job opportunities that match one’s qualifications.
This could serve as a valuable lesson in pragmatism and students who find closed doors in their preferred occupations would do well to continue their studies in a completely new field. Education will always be the key to good employment and that is why it is important to make the right choices preferably early on in one’s student years.
There will, of course, be some students who rather than switch to a new field which they don’t find naturally appealing, prefer to follow their dream and further their studies in their preferred field to Master’s and doctorate level. Often such a decision just postpones the disappointment one experiences when realising that one has made a wrong choice.
It is encouraging that there is almost universal acknowledgement that high educational achievement is the key to our future prosperity. This is the way it should be as education should never be a politically controversial issue. Yet we do have conflicting interpretations as to whether our educational strategy is giving us the results that we need.
We often reduce the debate on educational achievement to a question of comparing simple statistics, like the number of students who leave our educational system without any formal qualifications, or the number of science graduates. We need to agree on new metrics to measure success in the educational field. We need deeper analysis to determine whether the money we are spending on education is giving us the right results.
We should start by determining why so many of our students spend more than 10 years in formal education without achieving the minimum level of achievement. We also need to determine whether the competence of our students in the use of the English language is improving or deteriorating. We need to determine whether our stipends system is indeed motivating students to follow the kind of studies that our economy needs to create jobs and wealth.
We need to know whether our graduates are ending up working in jobs they trained for. We need to know whether we are suffering from a brain drain as our better qualified graduates leave the country when they fail to find the jobs they aspire for.
The soul-searching that we need to undertake to determine whether our educational system is indeed delivering the results we desire should include the first stages of primary and secondary schooling. Many academics argue that it may be the right time to enhance our vocational education system by reintroducing trade school that have a more pronounced bias in favour of practical technical education and work experience rather than academic learning. We need to look at models adopted in other countries that are enjoying economic success, partly thanks to their better educational system.
On a more practical level, our political leaders need to come up with better ways of supporting families who prefer to educate their children in private independent schools. There will no doubt be some academics who prefer to live in their comfort zone and argue that the priority of the state should always be to support state schools to the exclusion of private schools.
These academics are often the ones who send their own children to private schools claiming that they have a right to determine where to educate their children. Often this right is denied to those who would love to educate their children in private schools if only the state supported them financially.
The setting up of an independent commission to review our educational system would be an ideal first stem to hardwire excellence in our educational system and guarantee success for our students.
johncassarwhite@yahoo.com